"There are orange 'smart composting bins' on many street corners. But you’ll have to sign up for the NYC Compost app to open them...."

"You can also find a drop-off site with green bins that do not require an app. But the hours they are available may vary. The law says that any building with four or more apartments must have an area that’s accessible for compost drop-offs. What 'accessible' means is open to interpretation.... '"Accessible to residents" is going to look different in every building' and does not guarantee that a composting bin will be available around the clock or that there will be a bin on every floor...."

From "New York Is Getting Strict About Composting. Here’s What to Know. Starting April 1, buildings that don’t separate compostable waste from trash will face fines" (NYT).

Commence the ritual of atonement for your amorphous environmental sins. Or just eat every bit of every damned food item you buy. So: bone-out meat, fruit with edible peels, dried whole egg powder, etc.

"If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line."

Said John Tierney, quoted in "No, Recycling Will Not Save the Environment/Despite what you may have heard, many 'recyclables' sent to recycling plants are never recycled at all" (Reason).

The article is from 2 years ago, but it presents a video that I've been seeing tweeted and blogged this week, and I didn't remember seeing it before. That one-inch line visual really stuck with me. If it's correct, the answer is so obviously landfills, and people who think we're running out of space to just pile up our trash have been wildly misled.

"North Korea has released more than 3,000 of the trash balloons since May, many of which have reached the South after floating across the Demilitarized Zone...."

"They have landed on trees, farms and urban side streets, their payloads bursting and spilling out waste paper, used cloth, cigarette butts and compost​. On Wednesday, for the first time, some of them landed inside the sprawling compound in central Seoul that includes the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol... one of the most tightly guarded places in South Korea. Officials said they waited for the balloons to land before sending a chemical, biological and radiological response team to inspect their payloads, rather than blast them ​— and scatter their​ suspicious payloads ​— from the sky. The team found 'nothing dangerous or contaminating'...."

From "North Korean Trash Balloons Hit South Korean President’s Compound/Officials found nothing hazardous in the balloons’ payloads, as the North’s slow barrage of airborne garbage showed few signs of letting up" (NYT).

Why?

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

"At a Dumbo company warehouse recently in East Orange, N.J., on an industrial stretch opposite a cemetery..."

"... a crew of workers was preparing to jettison the last of a 9,500-pound office lot that a Brooklyn tech company had had in storage since April 2021.... [T]he client paid for the disposal of, among other things: 25 Herman Miller chairs; 20 computer monitor stands; 10 cubicle panels; nine boxes of carpet; and two flat-screen TVs. 'The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,' said... the owner of... a refurbishing company and liquidator.... In a choppy motion, the mouth of the excavator swung over the half-ton pile of furniture and chomped down, contorting the chairs into a dangly metal cephalopod."

From "The Afterlife of Forlorn Office Furniture/Some office furniture in the New York City area has been caught in pandemic limbo. What happens to it if no one really wants it?"

"I see that you're going to get rid of your piano. Good luck with that. We couldn't even give ours away so I took it apart and cut it up..."

"... and got rid of it by putting it in the trash over a 4 week period. I broke up the string harp with a sledge hammer. Used a drill to loosen the strings then just cut them off." 

Said William50 in last night's "Snow Car" café. 

He was referring to something I said in passing in an earlier post — that I had looked up "Flatter!," because it was part of an image on a card that I found in the piano bench, which I was emptying out because I'm getting rid of the piano. 

Breaking up a piano made me think about this great 80s video where they destroy a piano: 

And since you mentioned the harp inside, we must remember when Harpo Marx went nuts on a piano and extracted the harp:

Recently, I threw some books in the trash... well, the recycling bin... but you know what I mean: I threw books out.

I wanted to tell you to help you. I'm prompted by "We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. 'They’re more like friends than objects,’ one passionate bookseller says. What are we to do with our flooded shelves?" by Karen Heller (WaPo).

Book lovers are known to practice semi-hoardish and anthropomorphic tendencies. They keep too many books for too long despite dust, dirt, mold, cracked spines, torn dust jackets, warped pages, coffee stains and the daunting reality that most will never be reread. Age rarely enriches a book.

Nothing like a famous last name and a Harvard J.D. and a Harvard M.B.A. to scare the bejesus out of rats.

I'm reading "The Rats Are Absolutely Going to Hate the New Sanitation Commissioner/Jessica Tisch is determined to clean up New York" (NYT)"

Ms. Tisch, 41... is a lifelong New Yorker with a famous last name and three Harvard diplomas, including an M.B.A. and a law degree. Her grandfather and his brother founded the Loews Corporation and, thanks to philanthropic donations, their names grace many buildings in New York, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York University and the Children’s Zoo in Central Park....

"Doug Greene, 34, bought a 200-year-old rowhouse in Philadelphia five years ago, and after doing a gut renovation, found he didn’t want to bring mass-produced furniture..."

"... into a space he’d so painstakingly restored. So he taught himself how to make furniture, and he and his girlfriend, Ashley Hauza, now have a home where he handcrafted nearly every stick of furniture from solid wood. There’s a western red cedar waterfall bench. There’s a white oak bed frame with a hand-cut bridle joint."

From "'Fast Furniture' Is Cheap. And Americans Are Throwing It in the Trash. The mass-produced furniture that sold furiously during the pandemic could soon be clogging landfills" (NYT).

Is the NYT shaming the people who need or choose to buy inexpensive items for their home? After all, you could learn to "handcraft" your own furniture and spend oodles of time transforming "solid wood" into chunky items like that western red cedar waterfall bench. I suspect the wood alone would cost more than an equivalent bench from IKEA. The idea seems to be that cheaply bought stuff is readily thrown in the trash, whereas if you invest your time in crafting things or just spend a lot of money on expensive things, you'll be keeping them around, moving them arduously to your next apartment and the apartment after that.

"Frying pans were popular; now they’re not. No one wants toasters. Pens are good, pencils are not. Electric cables and wires go, as do electronic gadgets — even old broken laptops."

Says Vicki, "the 78-year-old woman who has been running the [Ludlow Street Free Store] for almost two decades," quoted in From "One Woman’s Quest to Rescue the Trash of the Lower East Side 'I accept the fact that I am funding my obsession'" (New York Magazine).

She starts setting up around 9 p.m. on any night it doesn’t rain, schlepping bags of salvaged goods from her small one-bedroom apartment down five flights of stairs and arranging them on the stoop..... A free store doesn’t need her to stick around and monitor what’s taken.... Around 3 a.m., she returns to pack up anything that remains.... ...Vicki spends the same energy and time saving a stack of cans of creamed corn as she does a pile of fur coats. 

Like many of her peers who came to the Lower East Side as punks and artists and squatters, Vicki is trying to live by the environmentalist and pacifist ideals she’s held since she was younger....  But she has long found antiwar work disheartening; as she says, “I have been spectacularly unsuccessful at saving the lives of my fellow human beings. But it turns out I’m somewhat better at saving things.”...

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

"A company that rents Dumpsters in six Wisconsin cities, but not in Madison, has a page on its website devoted to Dumpster diving, which states it's not illegal in Wisconsin."

"It advises people to read the signs around the Dumpster, and warns that if there's a 'no trespassing' sign or if the Dumpster is enclosed by a gate or fence on private property, not to go diving.... The benefits outweigh the risks, [Travis] Flannery said, as he pulled a new dog crate from his storage unit in the basement of his Cross Plains apartment building. He estimated it retails for $100. He also recently found an aquarium and filters still wrapped in plastic. 'I used to be in the fish hobby,' he said. 'This is a rimless, glass fish tank, brand new. If I can’t sell it, I'll use it. Fish tank filters new are $40 apiece.' Also in his locker were bottles of soda, collectibles for children, tote bags, strings of lights, throw pillows, blankets, seasonal decorations, artwork, dog food, cat litter, pet toys, dozens of picture frames with the glass still intact and the unopened coffeemaker, which is sold online for $40. Flannery said he learns the return policies of some stores from their online posts. There are stores, he said, that will get a case of something and if one of the products has broken open, the whole case is thrown away instead of just the open one. 'Here's a case of bleach,' he said. 'Why throw this away? It's bleach.'... So far, he's been caught twice, first by a Madison police officer. Flannery said he was with a friend and the officer asked what they were doing. 'We explained to him that we were Dumpster diving and just looking for some stuff that retail stores throw away,' Flannery said. 'He asked us if we were illegally dumping or anything of the sort. We said, 'No, we are actually taking things.' And he told us to have a wonderful night.'"

From "Confessions of a successful Madison Dumpster diver" (Wisconsin State Journal).

"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."

"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada’s countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei. 

As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.

ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me" and not "I didn’t own them and they didn’t own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.

"Fur coat? It is said that nobody wants fur these days, but animals do. Rehabilitators, like those at Sacred Friends, in Norfolk, Virginia, cut up old coats and..."

"... use the scraps as little capes and stoles to keep sick animals warm... peta wants your pelts, too. The organization donates them to the homeless ('the only humans with any excuse to wear fur,' according to its Web site), and lately it has shipped fur garments to Afghanistan and Iraq for use by refugees.... Your old bras are welcomed with open arms at the Bra Recyclers, a Phoenix-based enterprise that has sent more than four million bras to homeless shelters, schools, foster programs, and other nonprofits all over the world. As Elaine Birks-Mitchell, the founder of the Bra Recyclers, explained to me over Zoom, bras are not just about fashion. For girls in developing countries, they make it possible to play sports and attend school without embarrassment."

From "A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything/Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them?" by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker).

"They are fast, hard-working, green-hearted people. I love their energy and greenness, and I am so glad my age-old eco-passions gave birth to so many little green pirates."

From "They Love Trash/Young rebels take on the unpleasant byproducts of festival culture" (NYT).

Late summer box spring.

"A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the country are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins. Instead, they are being landfilled..."

"... burned or stockpiled. From Los Angeles to Florida to the Arizona desert, officials say, vast quantities of plastic are now no better than garbage.... Once the largest buyer of US plastic waste, [China] shut its doors to all but highest-quality plastics in 2017. The move sent shockwaves through the American industry as recyclers scrambled, and often failed, to find new buyers. Now the turmoil besetting a global trade network, which is normally hidden from view, is hitting home.... In total, only about half (56%) of the plastic waste that America once exported is still being accepted by foreign markets in the wake of China’s ban. This week, the Guardian revealed that what still goes overseas is inundating countries including Vietnam, Turkey, Malaysia and Senegal. But much of what remains has nowhere to go."

The Guardian reports.

"At 63, I Threw Away My Prized Portrait of Robert E. Lee," writes Retired United States Army general Stanley A. McChrystal...

... in The Atlantic.

The painting had no monetary value; it was really just a print of an original overlaid with brushstrokes to appear authentic.

Well, then... no great sacrifice. I clicked through to this because I'm opposed to the destruction of artwork for political purposes, but this isn't really artwork. The headline conned me. Dammit, McChrystal. "Prized Portrait" — spare me.

But 40 years earlier it had been a gift from a young Army wife to her lieutenant husband when the $25 price (framed) required juggling other needs in our budget.

You know, it's hard to throw out a gift you don't like. Took him 4 decades to work out the excuse to throw the thing in the garbage. But my question is, what does his wife say?

It was not a simple decision. For almost 150 years, Lee had been a subject of study, and of admiration, not only for his skill, but also as a symbol of stoic commitment to duty. And while I could appreciate the visceral association with slavery and injustice that images of the Confederacy’s most famous commander evoke, for a lifetime, that’s not the association I’d drawn. I’d read and largely believed Winston Churchill’s statements that “Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains known to the annals of war.”

At age 63, the same age at which Lee died, I concluded I was wrong—to some extent wrong about Lee as a leader, but certainly about the message that Lee as a symbol conveyed. And although I was slow to appreciate it, a significant part of American society, many still impacted by the legacy of slavery, had felt it all along....

The essay continues at great length about Lee, and I got tired of looking for the answer to my question about his wife, whose gift he threw out. Now, I'm down to the last paragraph:

The picture of fellow soldier Robert E. Lee that hung in my home and inspired me for so long is gone, presumably crushed and buried with the other detritus of life.

Including your wife — buried? That would explain the long-awaited freedom to throw out the "portrait."

But the memory remains. The persona he crafted of a disciplined, dutiful soldier, devoid of intrigue and strictly loyal to a hierarchy of entities that began with God and his own sense of honor, combined with an extraordinary aptitude for war, pulls me toward the most traditional of leadership models. I try to stand a bit straighter. But when I contemplate his shortcomings, and admit his failures, as I must my own, there is a caution I would also do well to remember.

No, nothing — in all that sententious prose —  nothing of the wife. She disappeared after that first mention, unnamed, "a young Army wife."

I looked up McChrystal's Wikipedia page so I could find the name of his wife and whether she is still living. I read this, under "Personal Life":

McChrystal married Annie Corcoran, also from a military family, in 1977. The couple have one son. McChrystal is reported to run 7 to 8 miles (11 to 13 km) daily, eat one meal per day, and sleep four hours a night.

Man, I wish I'd kept a list of all the people I've read sleep only 4 hours a night — Donald Trump, Elon Musk, etc. etc.  How about Robert E. Lee? Did he only sleep 4 hours? "[Lee] routinely turned down offers to use the homes of Southerners as his headquarters, preferring to sleep outside in his modest tent...." Can't see how long he slept. Don't know if he went jogging 7 or 8 miles a day. Don't know if he threw out presents from his wife.

"The task is so onerous that a new profession, called senior move managers, has arisen to help retirees sort their way through their mountains of possessions, one of many new industries in today’s longevity economy."

"Senior move managers exist for good reason: Without help, we may find that moving simply falls into the too-hard category, especially in later older age.... All of us live in many homes throughout our lives, but for many of us, the home of greatest significance is the one in which we spend our midlives, cultivating marriages, paying off mortgages, accumulating memories, raising children, progressing in our careers, and amassing possessions. Many, if not most, older adults have lived in the same residence for decades. After so much time spent in the same place, our memories are transferred onto the objects and environment around us. The architecture of our homes becomes part of the architecture of our minds. If we find ourselves restless at night, we can put ourselves to sleep just by performing a slow mental survey of every room in the house (try it, if you’re ever feeling insomniac). For those in later older age, in their 80s and 90s, a sudden unexpected move out of a long-lived residence can have a devastating effect on mental and physical health. Those of us with stronger constitutions might not crumble to dust, but still the experience is serious, natural doubts at the prospect of moving on from our longtime home. 'Am I really doing this? Am I really giving up my castle?'"

From "Want To Downsize In Retirement? Problem One, Millennials Don't Want Your Stuff" (Forbes).

What if all your memories could be saved? You've filled your head with that stuff. It's so important to you. But if, as you must leave this world, it could all be saved, would anyone want it? What are your favorite memories? What you could give them away, lodge them in someone else's head, where that other person could look upon them as if they were memories they acquired naturally — see "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick (AKA "Total Recall") — would anyone want them?

No, there are some things of yours that are great to you only because they are yours. Without you, they are worse than nothing, so it's best to let them go entirely. Let them become nothing, and not junky clutter for other people to hate.

Out on Picnic Point today...

... just taking a walk...



... what?



There's this: